"All governments are coercive" doesn't make democracy and authoritarianism equivalent

We see variations of this argument being put forward a lot, around the threadiverse:

It happens so often that it feels worth it to do a comprehensive dismantling of it, even though it's a bit like creationists vs atheists (perennial, done to death already, repetitive). This time will be different though!@

The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that's used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be nearly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here.

Yes, all states do have that monopoly but the distinction between authoritarian and democratic is not about whether there is coercive power or not (of course there is), the distinction is in how that power is constrained. Can that power be used against political rivals, or only against ordinary criminals? Can the people who wield that power be removed without bloodshed? Can you organise your own political party to contest that power? Is there a press or judiciary that is independent enough to expose abuse of that power? These are the kinds of things (among others!) that the distinction between authoritarian and democratic is about even though all states have police, military and courts.

Imagine saying “all humans die, therefore why bother distinguishing between heart attacks and homicides?”. Pointing to the universal thing (death, or power) doesn’t erase the variation that sits on top of it, it just changes the subject.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that the “binary” between authoritarian and democratic is a strawman - states are rated on continuous multi-dimensional spectrums like competitiveness of elections, judicial independence, press freedoms, executive constraints, and more. OP then goes on to replace that with a far cruder binary of his own - serves “the people” or does not. That is the subject that he changes the conversation to.

The only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account...

On the contrary - free elections, free press, independent courts are the mechanisms that provide accountability in a democracy, which are absent under authoritarianism. Democracy is, imperfectly, systems for making the rulers answerable to the ruled. In an authoritarian state a small group has control over the police, the courts, the media, and the economy, with very weak constraints. That's more concentrated than what Western elites have, not less.

meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class

This is asserted without evidence and does not follow as a conclusion of anything that came before. In an authoritarian state there is no mechanism for workers to remove a party if/when it stops representing them, so the party is not accountable to them. Also there is no mechanism to determine what the workers actually want.

Hence why there is widespread public trust in these governments and they enjoy broad support from the masses.

Under conditions where criticising the government is a criminal or career-ending act, the absence of visible dissent means nothing. It could be genuine consent or it could be effective repression and from the outside it’s impossible to empirically tell the difference. Citing high approval in a system that criminalizes low approval is a circular argument.

In democracy, trust is earned by the legitimacy that comes from free and fair elections and by the various accountability mechanisms mentioned earlier. It is that trust that makes coercion much less load-bearing than it is under authoritarianism. Even when someone disagrees with a law, when it was made by a democratically elected government people are more likely to comply because they understand the government has the right to make that law.

An authoritarian government can have power to make people obey because disobedience is costly to them personally. But that’s different from people accepting that the government has a right to exercise that power and obeying voluntarily.

It would be silly to pretend that western democracy is perfect or even very good. Economic elites DO disproportionately shape policy, campaign finance IS all fucked up, media concentration IS utterly crazy. But remember - people talk about these problems openly all the time, in official academic journals, in the media, on forums like this. Elite capture is something we can document and see in campaign finance reports, lobbying disclosures, investigative journalism, and more. We can fight against all of that and no one is coming to put us in a labor camp. That’s no small thing, that’s a huge difference between democracy and authoritarianism.

In authoritarian states the only time we hear about elite capture / corruption is when the party decides to. On its schedule, targeting people it chooses to, with the penalties it chooses. An imperfect democracy with all its dirty laundry being aired regularly is categorically different from authoritarianism where failures are hidden or ignored at will. This makes it pretty disingenuous to point to various problems in a democracy and compare it with the stability and stifling calm of an authoritarian state.

So yeah. We've got problems to deal with, big ones. But increasing the concentration of power, decreasing transparency and decreasing accountability by switching to an authoritarian system will not help with any of them.